Malocchio: The Evil Eye

A few weeks ago, we welcomed home our new cat (chat in French), as we often call her. With the apartment nearly fully decked out, we were ready to bring in the feline. However, finding your cat in Paris is no easy task. Just like apartments, a cat adoption demands a stack of paperwork  to fill out, and all this must be completed faster than the competition. We browsed various websites with adoptable kitty online profiles, kind of like facebook for cats-- what the internet era has done to cat adoption-- and we eventually found our "coup de coeur," literally "hit of the heart," meaning our favorite.

Picking her up was a story in and of itself. The "accueillant," the woman providing our chat  (previously known as Rosa) with temporary housing kept fairly unusual hours. The only time for which we could coordinate was 12:30am on Wednesday night. Arriving with a well-secured litter box (our kitty carrier had not yet arrived in the mail), we signed more papers and collected our kitty at an hour which demanded we circle the city in a nightbus full of questionable characters and our very confused cat in order to make it home at an hour when I'd have preferred not to be conscious.

Transport mission accomplished, we then had to face the next mission: a name. Months earlier, we thought we'd settled on a name while sitting in a cafe discussing the possibility of a cat. Of course,  names came up. We had to think of something we liked. Naturally, the first thing that came to Valentin's mind for me was bread (le pain in French; see title of this blog). And I thought he'd suggested Lapin (rabbit), to which I responded, why don't we just call it Chien (Dog)? This led to a bit of confusion typical of our conversations given our different native languages, and it ended in enough of a laugh that we figured we'd chosen a name.

However, the hunt for the feline namebearer led us to a very particular cat. As luck would have it, our new feline friend is one-eyed. (To be fair, the other eye is still there, unlike my first cat Monocle whose memory gave this cat her initial charm, but it's all cloudy white and doesn't work.) We couldn't give this cat a name without acknowledging her peculiar trait. Of course one-eyed names led us first into the domain of pirates, but we couldn't find a suitably inspirational female pirate with a name we both liked. All the while, our cat who we continued calling chat became more and more aggressively friendly. (We eventually figured out that this was because she was trying to convince us to change her brand of cat food.) Nonetheless, her excessive sweetness made the name we did find all the more amusing: Malocchio, or Malo for short. On a literal level, this means Bad-Eye in Italian but is used as a term for a curse ("the Evil Eye") set upon someone by the envy or ill-wishes of another. Given the eye and the evil plots she is constantly devising against various articles of furniture and things that roll, the name stuck.

So here she is, the newest addition to our home, Malocchio.